During the past several years a new flywheel technology has evolved, which has resulted in a several-fold improvement in the performance of the flywheel structure, while at the same time offering major advances in safety and economy of the device. These improvements are for the most part brought about by the employment of anisotropic, filamentary materials such as carbon or fiberglass fibers or a new DuPont fiber known as Kevlar, all having strength-to-density properties significantly greater than the best practical steel. In addition, the filamentary composition of such materials is of significant importance in flywheel application, since it is this property which enables the flywheel to be more readily designed for failure containment than solid steel flywheel structures previously proposed.
More particularly, it has previously been proposed that improved flywheels can be constructed in the form of wound disc structures with either fiberglass or steel foil as the principal structural material, and such structures are described in detail in a Russian book entitled, "Inertial Energy Accumulators", by N. V. Gulia, Voronezh University Press, Voronezh, 1973. Unfortunately, such structures have had only limited success, because of the hub or hub/spoke attachment difficulty usually found with this type of structure. In an effort to overcome the hub or hub/spoke attachment problem associated with wound disc flywheel structures, I previously proposed a circular brush flywheel configuration which utilizes radially oriented fibers or rods, such as are disclosed in my U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,698,262 and 3,737,694. On the other hand, for certain flywheel applications, it would be advantageous to have an alternative flywheel configuration which appears capable of storing more energy per unit volume than the circular brush configuration, and at a reduced rotational speed or rpm for a given energy level.
The principal reason that previous attempts to build filament-wound flywheels have met with only limited success is the fact that the stress on the wound filaments varies as the square of the distance of the filaments from the center of rotation. Since the amount that the filament stretches is proportional to the stress, the filament thus also stretches in proportion to the square of its radius of rotation; i.e., in a wound rotor having an inside radius of one-third its outside radius, the outside filaments would stretch nine times as much as the filaments on the inside. In this situation, as has been demonstrated many times in past experiments, the flywheel breaks into many concentric rings long before the filaments have reached their breaking stress. This, of course, is true if there are no extra radial filaments in the flywheel structure to take the radial loads. On the other hand, is such extra filaments are added, then the weight of these filaments must be added when determining the energy density of the structure. This simple paradox accounts for the lack of success of filament-wound and multi-rim flywheels previously attempted; performance typically being about 20-30% of theoretical.
One previously proposed manner of accommodating the differential stretching of the filamentary materials is to provide an elastomer matrix which acts as a spacer between the rings or filaments of a multi-ring flywheel allowing the rings to expand while maintaining structural integrity. However, a problem with this arrangement is designing the flywheel so that the elastomer can withstand the high acceleration forces occurring during flywheel operation, and at the same time provide the required stretch capabilities in some direction while also providing the required stiffness in other directions. Moreover, the elastomer matrix will occupy as much as 30% of the space occupied by the working filaments, thereby degrading the volume, weight, and intrinsic cost of this type by about 1/3 compared to the theoretical optimum multi-ring flywheel configuration.